This exhibition is also a fundraiser for my upcoming Arctic residency with The Arctic Circle, sailing to Svalbard in spring 2027. There I will be listening for bowhead whales and for the ice itself. Melting, cracking, fracturing ice makes a sound: a whole shifting soundscape of a sea coming apart faster than anyone predicted. That melt opens the water to more ships, and more ships mean more human-made noise flooding into a soundscape these animals depend on to survive. The recordings I bring back will not only become new work, they will be shared with the scientists studying these waters, to use in their own research.

Each piece begins with sound. My starting point is the waves and frequencies pulled from recordings of killer whales, humpbacks, belugas, and sperm whales. From there, the work becomes something you can see: the vocalizations of these animals rendered into color, line, and layered form. In the Arctic pieces to come, that same language will hold several voices at once, the whale, the ice, and the vessel, the living call, the fracturing floe, and the mechanical hum, so the pressure of a warming ocean is something you can stand in front of and feel.

What draws me in is the research. Scientists are working to help us comprehend the world of cetaceans, where emotion, sensation, and habitat combine into a form of communication that can feel like an alien world. When sound and research come together, they tell a larger story than anything visible at the surface of the water.